The Buffet Era
Not long ago, consuming artificial intelligence felt like entering the buffet.
You would pay the relatively cheap subscription fee and enjoy yourself. Writing papers, getting summaries, proofreading, conducting research, brainstorming and iterating twenty times if needed. It might have been quite handy in terms of daily life for many. Not in terms of actually doing professional work, but definitely when it came to doing simple things faster.
This perception has already changed quite a bit.
The Hidden Cost
Sure, the plans are still there. But in reality, you now face many more restrictions, limitations, and, well, fewer chances to actually enjoy yourself. At least until you exhaust your multi-hour quota of the month in just a few minutes thanks to hard work with the tools.
An example perfectly explains what I mean: Anthropic just prohibited the use of their fixed-rate subscription (called Claude Pro) on the autonomous agent tool known as OpenClaw. They understood that having one person automate tasks all day cost them a lot of computational expenses – thousands of dollars. And the monthly fixed payment became unsustainable for them when the user required nothing else but maximum performance.
No, this isn’t accidental either.
Sure, for years, we were talking about the costs of training new AI models, which are undeniably colossal. But training models is a one-off thing. The true expenses lie in the future, when millions of users consume the model every hour and every minute, all day long. This is called inference: sustaining a continuous experience in order to let people use the service.
And yes, even though you cannot see these costs at first glance, they certainly affect the consumer.
Which is why it now seems like the services became “expensive,” despite existing relatively inexpensive subscription plans. This is due to the fact that the problem is no longer connected to the initial entry point price, but to the amount of actual access after subscribing.
The New Normal
In my opinion, the phase of unlimited and free AI access has come to an end. It becomes evident with every passing moment that intensive use will remain a luxury for those who will earn with AI – while casual users will receive significantly less room to play with the service.
But it doesn’t seem shocking to me at all, as they are not charities but business corporations anyway. However, it seems necessary to emphasize that the concept of “universal accessible AI for all” shifts significantly when the intensive utilization is no longer sustainable within the usual subscription service. And today we already have $100 options, but in near future, people can expect to pay $500 and even $1,000 per month to access the full potential.
Perhaps, the time when they served us AI “all you can eat” style is over not because of technological advances.
It is over because they can no longer do it.